Posts Tagged ‘startups’

I recently attended Under the Radar 2012 as GoGrid was a sponsor of this event. As there were several tracks, Michael Sheehan and I split the tracks and I covered Infrastructure, Database Scalability and Big Data. Michael covered Mobile Access, Infrastructure, Performance Monitoring, PaaS in Part 1. Overall, the presenting companies have some compelling ideas and it gives an indicator as to the new thinking happening in Silicon Valley. The trends that I noticed were: a continued interest in private clouds, the increase in adoption of Openstack and the prevalence integrating Big Data.

If you never attended Under the Radar, the format is to have four startups that already have a real product present for 6 minutes and are then judged by a panel of experienced executives at more established companies. The presenters had to be companies that are actual startups with a unique value proposition and a real product that they are able to monetize. Alumni or companies that are already more established can also present as a “Grad Circle” member but they are not included in the awards presented at the end of the show. And like American Idol, the audience also has a vote on their favorites for each category. I included the Judge’s choice and Audience choice for each category but also added my own choice which reflects my own opinion and not that of GoGrid.

Infrastructure

This category focused on companies that are delivering infrastructure or infrastructure management products. So this would include services that could offer up infrastructure components (like compute, network, and storage) or even tools for managing configurations and deployments. Not surprisingly, nearly all of them focus on the cloud as the operating model of choice.

Cloudscaling – This company focuses on delivering an amazon-like cloud using Openstack. Their solution is comprised of Open Cloud OS, which is a product grade version of Openstack, Cloudblocks, a comprehensive architecture for cloud services and Hardware Blueprints, which are templates for physical hardware. Customers can leverage this solution to deploy a public or private cloud in their own DC.

Last week’s Under the Radar 2012 conference (UTR) provided me and other attendees with a glimpse of what’s going to be hot in the coming year from a startup and technology standpoint. Take your pick from the following hot-list of terms: Big Data, analytics, mobile, enterprise, private cloud, security and platforms. They are all intertwined in some way or another.

The format of UTR is fun, one of the MC’s described it as the American Idol for Startups. Basically, each startup (which have been in stealth mode and only just coming from behind the curtains) had 6 minutes to do an “elevator pitch” describing their product or service, how it works, why it is important and what they are looking to achieve. The startups were grouped by a theme (Mobile Access, Infrastructure, Performance Monitoring, PaaS, Database Scalability, Cloud Services and Big Data) and there were 4 companies being judged within each category. And what about the judges? Akin to the American Idol style, they were a collection of industry experts who asked poignant and humorous questions to drill deeper into the presentation pitch. The judges then selected their choice as the winning company, and the audience got to weigh in as well via a mobile text vote.

This marked the 3rd year that GoGrid sponsored UTR and the 2nd year having GoGrid CMO Jeffrey Samuels as a judge on one of the startup panels (“Performance Monitoring”). And several of us from GoGrid (including Rupert Tagnipes who provides his analysis of the Infrastructure, Database Scalability and Big Data sessions he covered in his Part 2 article) attended the sessions to see what upcoming technology trends were emerging, what companies were concerned about and what direction we are all heading. Personally, I attended the Mobile Access, Performance Monitoring and PaaS sessions and my analysis and personal winner choices for these sessions are below (note: my choices are my own opinion and not that of GoGrid.)

From the sessions that I saw, there seemed to be a clear trend of enterprise mobility, security, data analysis and simply “making things easier.” Also, a majority of the companies presenting seemed to have well vetted business plans, were monetizing and actually have customers and users. This is obviously a big difference from those wonderful “dot-com” days when you really didn’t need anything and VCs simply threw money at you. Conversely, while supposedly coming out of stealth-mode, most of these presenting companies were well down the path of success. The sections below include the Judge’s Winner, the Audience Winner, and My Choice.

GoGrid is pleased to be a sponsor of this year’s FailCon 2009 which is a 1 day conference where you can find out how NOT to be one of those nine companies that fail when starting up. FailCon is a forum where you can ask those questions you were always afraid to ask, and the people giving the answers are successful founders, investors, designers and developers. GoGrid is offering a 25% discount on tickets to FailCon so read on!

It’s not easy being an entrepreneur and it is practically impossible to be a SUCCESSFUL one. In fact, having some battle scars from a failure or two will make your next endeavor more successful (hopefully). Have you had a #FAIL tag assigned to your brand? You probably can be a speaker or an expert at FailCon. But the goal of the conference is to help you move beyond the failure and on to the next success!

Some of the questions that will be discussed at FailCon are (from the FailCon site):

What variables do VCs watch for to preemptively prevent a company going under?

How do you financially prepare for the possibility of failure: legally, fiscally, and in your team?

What have some of the leading executives today learned from their past experiences?

What are you watching out for with the current social web and rising companies?

From Monday through Wednesday (Sept 8-10), GoGrid will be an exhibitor at TechCrunch 50. The TechCrunch Expo was started last year with a simple goal: “find the best start-ups and launch them in front of our industry’s most influential VCs, corporations, fellow entrepreneurs and press.” This is an event where 50 start-ups are launched into stardom. There is also a “DemoPit” where 100 early stage startups are introduced to the public.

We have always felt that it is important to give startups an opportunity to succeed by allowing them to focus on their business and not their hosting. GoGrid is great for startups for so many reasons: usage-based billing, scalability, free support, and the on-demand nature of requisitioning and provisioning hardware in real-time. Furthering our commitment to startups, GoGrid (and ServePath) also host a not-for-profit meetup in San Francisco called StartUp SF. This event is designed to provide people who are engaged in initial stages of a startup, thinking about launching a new company or just excited to exchange ideas with like-minded professionals, with tactics and strategies to head down the road of success. We will be having the StartUp SF (v1.3) meetup at the conclusion of TechCrunch 50 from 6-9pm (just at the right time to have some food and drinks and hear some design team strategy tips from guest speaker, Scott Nazarian, from the premier design shop, frog design).

For those who want to follow the action of TechCrunch 50, uStream has provided a live feed of the event (shown below):